Why the health minister has been singled out for special targetting

Joe Cassar: the prime minister has several crackpots on his hands, but luckily, he's also got a psychiatrist in the cabinet

Will the Office of the Prime Minister please distinguish between what it calls ‘personal attacks’ and actual lies?

Those who are in the kitchen have to learn how to deal with the heat (and not by whining that it should stop) or just butt out.

When you’re on the public pay-roll and asking for people’s votes, expect criticism, even the kind which hurts.

It goes with the territory, it’s democracy, and it might not be nice but it’s essential.

Lies and slander, on the other hand, are a different matter altogether.

Lies are lies. Slander is slander.

Everyone who is lied about and slandered is right to object, public pay-roll or not, votes or not. And the law is on their side, though its wheels grind very slowly.

When the Office of the Prime Minister criticised the stories being put about by the Labour Party, on the subject of Health Minister Joe Cassar, it should not have described them as ‘personal attacks’. It should have avoided clouding and confusing the issue, by condemning them as outright slanderous lies.

‘Personal attacks’ – will somebody please define what this means? – are legal, legitimate and entirely justifiable when the subject is a politician, a legislator, a minister and on the public pay-roll. Lies and slander, however, are not. They are illegal, illegitimate, and not justifiable in any way, not even if these are the only means Labour can think of to get into power quickly.

There is another difficulty here. The Office of the Prime Minister can’t explain WHY Minister Joe Cassar is now being singled out for special targetting by the Labour Party, which has taken its cue from that tedious man, Franco Debono.

But I have absolutely no problem telling you myself. Cassar is a psychiatrist. Before he joined the cabinet, he was one of Malta’s busiest psychiatrists. In the cabinet, he has almost certainly been kept busy as a consultant psychiatrist too – in an unofficial capacity, of course, because he’s had to let go of his professional practice.

The prime minister has had a few crackpots on his hands these last four years, and so who better to turn to for advice on how to diagnose them and cope with them (I would imagine…)?

And Franco probably found out and didn’t like it. So now he’s snarling at Minister Cassar, to add to his growing list of ministers he hates.